This is the seventh chapter of the serial novel Pirayus. For the previous chapter, see Chapter Seven or start at the beginning with Chapter One. If you really want to skip to reading just this chapter, review The Story So Far for a quick update and come back.
“It doesn’t take much to turn this transmitter back on.” he said.
“I am aware of that.” said Myers. “Before talking about your demands, promise me you will listen.”
“Who are you, exactly? It’s obvious you’re more than you seemed at first.”
“Cold Storage operates under contract with the League. They answer to me.” She held out a hand in front of her, as if to shake someone else’s, even though Aaron was behind her. He could see her offer a teasing smile. “Betrys Myers, League Magistrate of Genetic Crimes.”
“Is there a crime?”
Betrys Myers only nodded her head to one side in response. The pod came to a stop and they entered a dim, narrow passage with walls so high Aaron couldn’t see the end of them. He noted to himself that this place seemed to have a lot of ominous spaces. Each of the walls was a grid made of tiles about one meter square. Each tile bore a panel with markings, computer readouts, and what looked like connectors of various types. After five minutes of silence broken only by Myer’s sharp footfall, the magistrate stopped. She pointed out one of the tiles. Aaron saw that its computer readout noted that it was vacant and that its last occupant was Asandra.
“Maybe you’re expecting me to be shocked.” said Aaron. “It’s just like I imagined it. A network of catacombs full of crypts for people who are still living.”
“I’m offering you my trust.” She tapped the wall filled with shudders. “I’m guessing that if you activated the red queen in here, you would kill me.” Folding her arms in front of her, she said, “I’m a little puzzled by your request. What do you mean, to take yourself and your daughter to a haven world? I was wondering what you imagine a haven world would be.”
“A colony outside the League.”
“There’s nothing outside the League.”
“You know what I mean.” said Aaron. “There are a few settlements at the edge, too small to bother building a ridge to and several days travel at least from the nearest ridge terminal. You call them a part of the League, but it’s no secret that they operate in near complete autonomy.”
“And you know nothing of these places except rumors.”
“I have to work with what there is. Also, I’ll need trade currency.”
Myers laughed. “You want money? Maybe you’d like to travel there in a sailing ship too?”
“They still use money there. I know you keep reserves of trade currency to deal with them.”
“Do you want to know what I think your problem is?” She said. “It’s greed. And I don’t mean for trade currency, but something much more. Before the League automated all production, there was some difference between rich people and poor people. People hoarded money and things. Our ancestors thought that if they rid the world of its money, they’d rid it of its greed.” She shook her head. “But greed is a fundamental human trait. Remove one thing a person covets and another thing will take its place.”
“What makes me greedy? Wanting my daughter to be with me instead of here?”
“Yes, yes, that is exactly it.” said Myers. “You can’t talk about her as if she’s your property that you can do with as you like. She doesn’t belong to you. Like you and me, she came from a factory and lives under the guidance of the Sorter. What the Meropenes don’t understand, you and I have bread into our bones. We are each one part of a single large organism.”
“An Ubelia?”
Myers nodded. “Do you understand what that means?”
“The first letter of each of the six tenets spell Ubelia. It’s a flower.”
“A very rare flower, which has resisted attempts to clone it. I only ever seen them in one place, the same place I suspect you encountered them, the abbey of a mutual friend of ours.”
“Martin Thomas is no friend of mine.”
“Well, the Reverend is my friend. He and I share many views. Not least among these is the knowledge that people like you, people who want to leave the civilization our ancestors worked so hard to build, are nothing but greedy and selfish.”
“Fine Betrys.” Now it was Aaron’s turn to laugh. “You and Martin actually kind of sound the same, with all that fire and brimstone bullshit. Just show me what you’ve got. I’m not a complete jerk - if there really is some way I can help, then I’ll help.”
Myers turned and continued walking. “Then welcome again the Cold Storage Echo. What you are about to see may be see may spell our extinction or the beginning of Technogensis. Either way, it’s the end of life as we know it.”
#
Aaron and Myers stood near two transparent cubes. The cubes stood on a platform about waist high and each was just large enough to hold a cat sized animal. They had exited the catacombs and arrived at a room that was inviting by comparison. It was sized to human scale and looked to Aaron like a biological lab. This suspicion was confirmed when an opening appeared beneath one of the cubes and a lift deposited a rodent-like creature into the space.
“Do you recognize this animal?” said Myers.
“Looks like a toskyr. They’re native to Pirayus.”
Myers nodded and brushed a button on her wrist. A mechanized arm appeared inside the cube. The end of the arm held a syringe, which it plunged into the toskyr. The animal squealed and cringed under the needle, but once the procedure was over, it walked about as if nothing had happened. Then an opening appeared in the second cube and released another toskyr. Another robotic limb struck it with a syringe. This time the creature stopped where it stood and began to shudder. It arched its back and opened its mouth. The most unsettling thing was the absence of noise. Its mouth was open and vibrating as if the things was trying to squeal, but it was unable to release its breath. Aaron watched its skin ripple as if infested with a colony of worms.
“This is the end of the shuddering.” said Myers. “The internal organs themselves begin to warp and twist until they pull apart.”
“Do I have to watch the rest of this?”
The toskyr’s eyes bulged and finally burst, covering its face with bloody pus. At last, the thing’s muscles gave out and its severe arch collapsed, rolling its body over and leaving a lump of flesh that looked as though it been crushed beneath a heavy object.
“You could have just told me.” said Aaron. “It wasn’t necessary to kill a living creature.”
“Do you know what the difference between those two tokyrs was? The first was a natch, and the second a fabrile. As you can see, we’ve isolated the source of the shuddering. We’ve actually known since the beginning what it was.”
“I always thought it was some kind of defect in the synthesis.” said Aaron. “If it were an external pathogen like a virus or a bacteria, you would’ve sequenced it and developed an immunity long ago.” He put his palm against the glass where the folded mass of skin and bone lay. “It looks like I was wrong.”
“It is a pathogen, but it isn’t a bacteria or a virus or a poison. Let me show you what it is.”
She led him to a large screen which displayed an image that Aaron couldn’t classify. It looked like a long insect curled into a spiral, but only in the way some ink blots looked like bats. When he stared at it, his brain wanted to call it an insect, though it was clearly something else. It’s parts were not well defined, but it did have blotchy shapes that resembled antennae and a thorax. Near one end were bent shapes that could have been a pair of large hind legs.
“This,” said Myers, “Is the microscopic creature that is the source of all our troubles. We call it a locust because of its shape.”
“It’s alive?”
“What does it mean for something to be alive? It moves and it reproduces, but it’s like nothing in our evolutionary chain. It isn’t carbon based. It has no DNA that we can identify, though there must be something similar at work.”
“So it’s some sort of alien parasite.” said Aaron. “It uses us to reproduce? Why only fabriles?”
“No, it doesn’t need us to survive.”
“What do you mean?”
“Locusts can reproduce without us. They don’t get energy from us. They can live in a vacuum.”
“So it isn’t a parasite.”
“Oh yes it most certainly is.” said Myers. “And that is where you come in.”
She pointed at the red queen.
Aaron held up the device, saying, “These things are after the Bodhi Chip?”
“Not at first, but they seemed to have discovered its utility. We routinely record Bodhi signals and send them to the Sorter. As you said, decoding the signals is illegal and in any case impossible because the encryption was designed by the Sorter. However, we like to send the recordings along to the Sorter in the event that it can help us decipher what is going on. Some time ago, we noticed an anomaly… some of the signals were coming through without encryption. For example, this one.”
Myers switched the screen from the image of the locust to a grainy video recording. Aaron had to stare at it for a minute before he could make out what he was looking at. Not only was the image filled with scratches and jumps, the room it showed him was dark. Then he recognized a window and the silver projections of the leaves outside that window. Aaron lived on an island and on that island stood one tree, the tree outside his daughter’s window. It was in fact a bodhi tree, a silent witness to his daughter’s suffering.
For a long time, that suffering was the only thing the tree represented. This was not a recording of Asandra shuddering in the dark, however. It came from an earlier time. The frame panned from one side to another as if showing the point of view of someone in the room. Then it arced down to a patch of moonlight on the floor, where two armies of chess pieces stood atop a board. Aaron remembered how Asandra used to get up in the middle of the night when she was little. He’d hear her talking to herself, marshalling her forces as she played against her own mind, her own best opponent.
Then there was a noise that could’ve been the wind moaning, except the shadow of the tree didn’t waver as it might in a storm. The sound was somehow more plaintive, more wounded. The image tipped up to see the window, which buckled and bulged until it dissolved into many specs and blew away as if made of nothing but salt. The room was open to the air now. The planet’s silver second moon was no longer round as it usually was. It was much closer as well, lurking behind the tree. It drew nearer and nearer and though the leaves Aaron could see it start to assume the shape of a face. That face had a mouth that moaned. Then the moon blinked off. A second later, it appeared inside Asandra’s room. the face as large as a wall and stretched into an angry scream.
The video recording stopped, frozen on the image of the silvery screaming face.
Aaron backed away, saying, “Are you telling me that this is what you recorded?”
“And many other images from other shudders.”
“Not off a Bodhi Chip.”
“Yes.”
“But the chip records sensations - not thoughts or dreams or memories or whatever that was.”
“True, but the locusts can do that. Like your red queen, they have deciphered the encryption on the Bodhi Chops and can use them to transmit what they have found from one chip to another, or some other place entirely. The chip is merely a means of getting the data out. The locusts themselves tap into these reserves of human thought, like Asandra’s memory of a dream she had as a little girl.”
“Why?”
“Because they are parasites.” said Myers. “Locusts are parasites of information. They mine the brain for data, in the process destroying the nervous system. That would explain why the locusts go into hibernation when we put a host into Cold Storage. They are waiting for more information. Except that now they’ve figured out how to wake up some of the hosts. Hibernating the children will not work for much longer.”
“Why? What is the point?
“They pass the information along from one locust to another within a body, and then from body to body through the Bodhi Chips, moving it all down in a long chain where each link is a shudder child. And perhaps if we can find out the end of that chain, we can find out who or what is responsible.”
“Why fabrile children?” said Aaron. “What do they know? I mean, what could any child possibly have that’s of use to this thing or anything that would go so such lengths? All I can think of is that it’s a weapon.”
“That was our first thought too. Some of my people were quick to point the finger at radical Meropene groups, but they were quickly shouted down by those who don’t think natches are capable of designing something so puzzling as a locust. Of course, there are some fabrile Meropenes out there, more and more with each passing year. But they’d be putting themselves at risk. Locusts don’t care about religion.”
“You really don’t think a natch Meropene could’ve made this?”
Myers smiled. “I know what you’re thinking. Some people would rather not consider it.”
“Why is it so hard?” said Aaron. “There are billions of natches in the galaxy. Someday, somewhere, a few could be born that are equal to any fabrile by mere luck of the draw. Given the way Atropan fabriles treat their people, it would be no surprise if they use their abilities against us. It would be our own damn fault if they did so and we turned a blind eye to the possibility… just because it challenges all this stuff we want to believe about our superiority and the inevitability of Technogensis.”
“I gather when you say that we want to believe in those things, you aren’t really including yourself.”
“Children are dying. Someday my daughter may die like that toskyr. Nothing else matters - so you told me I could help and I’ve been patient with you.”
“Of course.” said Myers, and led him to another part of the lab where there was a large coffin sized case with a glistening metallic exterior. “As with any outbreak, it is important to consider patient zero.”
The magistrate slid open the front of the coffin. Behind a glass barrier stood a naked man, preserved as though he were a museum exhibit. Aaron guessed that the man was about his own age when he died. If this was the first shudder, he was in good condition. He looked nothing like the mangled toskyr. He looked peaceful, as though he might awake at any moment and tap on the glass, asking to be let out for a walk.
“This is Joseph Black, a fabrile Atropan from Pirayus. By all accounts he was a friendly but reclusive man, preferring to live in the Uplift Sectors rather than in the main settlements. Joe wasn’t a city boy. About forty years ago, he came into a hospital with complaints of headaches and muscle spasms. They were unable to treat him and passed him around all the members of the Pirayan medical congress before realizing they had something unique on their hands. They packed him off to our world so he could receive care at best medical research facility in the League, Kepler Advanced Medicine.”
“They must have found these locusts right away.”
“Yes, and that is when my predecessor got involved. He suspected that we were dealing with a genetic crime of some sort. He didn’t make much progress before Joseph died. As you can see, his death was not as violent as you might expect. The locusts were not as advanced then. They couldn’t use the Bodhi Chip and they didn’t seem very capable of invading the nervous system to the extent they do today. They were, nonetheless, very deadly. Joseph eventually went insane and escaped the hospital to the ridge station. Some passengers waiting for a shuttle reported that he said something cryptic about going back to Pirayus before he expelled himself from an airlock, apparently attempting to jump into the ridge.”
“Doesn’t sound much better than dying of convulsions.” said Aaron.
Myers went on as if Aaron hadn’t spoken. “The previous magistrate dispatched a team to Pirayus to look for the culprit. They were looking for terrorists, but to this day we still haven’t found the group responsible. What they did find were the toskyrs. There are many running around the Uplift Sectors on that planet. As it turned out, Joseph Black had a pen full of fabrile toskyrs he had built himself. They were all dead.”
“Why would anyone…”
“Well,” said Myers. “Even before Jospeh went insane, he was always a bit of an odd duck. People reported that he believed the toskyrs carried an infection that would destroy humanity. It turns out he was right, because the wild toskyrs were carrying locusts, though as you saw from my demonstration they were unaffected. Mr. Black’s notes indicate that he was designing his own fabrile species as a sort of trojan horse, in an attempt to kill the natch toskyr population by invading their dens. What he didn’t realize is that he had it all backwards. His fabrile rodents were indeed a trojan horse, but he was the target.”
Aaron rubbed his hands on his forehead as if rubbing away a headache.
“I’m confused.” he said. “Somehow some natch animals who are running around in the wild become infected with these locusts, which do nothing to them. Then a random lunatic creates a fabrile version of the same thing, the locusts passed to them, killing them but also jumping species to a human?”
“Yes.”
“How did the wild toskyrs become infected in the first place?”
“I don’t know.”
“It has to have been deliberate. Like you say, a trojan horse, lying in wait for the right victim.”
“It would seem that way.” said Myers.
“But…” Aaron screwed up his face and then burst into an abbreviated laugh. “Really? It’s just so damn… convoluted.”
“Perhaps it had to be, to prevent detection.”
“No, it still doesn’t make sense. It would take so much effort to create these locusts and it all relies on what? Some bumble out in the wilderness of Pirayus getting the notion to create fabrile toskyrs? Who could’ve even predicted…” Aaron’s voice trailed away and his face assumed a look of sudden recognition.
“You see what I am getting at.” said Myers. “In the end, Joseph Black was still a fabrile and an Atropan. There is one thing that could predict that he’d move to Pirayus and live in the Uplift and breed infected animals.”
“The Sorter.”
“Yes.”
“You think the locusts came from the Sorter.”
“Yes.”
Aaron shook his head. “Why? Why would it try to kill us? And why would you believe that it is? You seem to me like a real zealot. You worship this thing as the ultimate source of wisdom that will lead as all to this magical Technogenesis.”
“You’re definitely a skeptic, aren’t you Aaron?”
“And if you’re right, I’ll be even more of one. Who wants to follow any kind of intelligence who would do this to us?”
“Aaron… humans may have created the Sorter, but it has evolved into realms of understanding that we can’t traverse. We can, however, be reassured that it will always be true to its original directives. We created it to save ourselves and it will not let us down. It may work in ways that are mysterious to us, but we have to follow where it leads. It is our best hope.”
“And if it leads to our extinction?”
“Many Atropans believe that Technogenesis is close, that we may arrive there in our generation. However, there needs to be some sort of catalyst that will take us over the final barrier. It would not be illogical to think that crossing such a barrier is going to be difficult and require some sacrifice. We are likely to resist such sacrifice and many may lose faith in the path along the way. The Sorter would know this and find a way to do its work so that we cannot undo it.”
“For what end?” said Aaron. “How does shaking to death help anyone?”
“I don’t know. I really don’t. And maybe I’m wrong. We have asked the Sorter and it has been silent. And yet, you arrive here having developed the same technology as the locusts. It makes me wonder, did the Sorter send us to you? Could you unlock the secret? Like Joseph, you are fabrile and you are Atropan. Even if you don’t believe in it anymore, nothing you do is a mystery to the Sorter. What you have built inside that red queen cannot be a coincidence.”
“If so, then the Sorter knows I’ve lost my faith in it and I’m not interested in helping your cause.”
“It also knows you are motivated by love for Asandra. Does it matter what you believe?”
Aaron had been noticing his blood pressure rising and his face becoming hot. He didn’t know what to say about any of this. If anything, the grand theories of League Magistrate Betrys Myers only made him more determined to jump in a ship and escape to someplace where none of this mattered. Yet it after seeing what the locusts did to that animal, it was hard to resist the possibility that he might indeed figure out what the shuddering was all about. He removed the red queen from his pocket again and placed his thumb near the bottom of it, where the button that activate it was.
“I still want to go.” he said. “But I’ll think about it, and let you know.”
Myers clasped her hands together and pursed her lips.
“Very well.” she said. She opened a drawer and removed a small hand held device. “Can I at least take a sample of your DNA? Perhaps I can find something out about you that way? And then maybe I can convince you?”
Aaron nodded and held out a hand. “Let me do it.”
He took the device and placed it against his cheek. He pulled a little trigger and then gave it back to Myers. She plugged it into a computer console. She watched reports appears on the screen.
“Can I leave now?” said Aaron. “Let me know what you’ll find.”
The woman didn’t answer.
“Betrys, I still have my finger on the queen.”
Myers shook her head. Then she took a deep breath and and walked backwards away from the console. She turned and stared at Aaron, her mouth parted and her eyes wide.
“Your’re not fabrile.” she said.
“What?”
“Did you know that? You’re not fabrile at all.” Her hand blindly searched the drawer from which she had produced the DNA extractor. She came up with a weapon. “Who are you? Another trojan horse?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“If I see your finger move, I’ll kill you. Put the queen down.”
The stared each other down for a moment, and then the room shook. The screen from which Myers had shown him the locusts and Asandra’s dream came to life agains, this time with the image of the police Lieutenant.
“What was that?” said Myers.
“A tidal shock.” said the Lieutenant. “There may be more. You need to get to a safe zone.”
“A tidal shock? From where?”
“From the ridge portal. Something’s happening. We’ll figure it out, but get to a safe zone.”
Aaron thought about his options, but not for long. He wasn’t a person to let an opportunity slip by. He wasn’t sure exactly what kind of opportunity had just appeared, but it hardly mattered. He’d always figured out what to do before. He pressed the red queen. Myers collapsed in writhing pain.
“Magistrate!” shouted the Lieutenant.
With a croaking voice, Myers said, “Get down here!”
The man was distracted by something off screen. “Reports are saying there was an explosion at the ridge station on Pirayus. It’s coming back through the ridge towards us. There are multiple tidal shocks. We need to brace ourselves.”
“Lieutenant!”
The room shook again. Aaron made for the door. He found himself in the catacombs. All of the computer read outs on all the crypts were flashing gibberish. And alarm was sounding. It occurred to him that his device might be causing some sort of harm to these children. He shut it off. He looked back through the open doorway and saw Myers getting back to her feet.
“What does that mean?” he said.
“No.” she shook her head.
“What? Tell me!”
“You were too close. You’ve damaged the regulation systems.”
“What does that mean?”
“They’re waking up.”
Another shock wave hit them, this one far more powerful than the first two. All at once, the displays and lights on the crypts shut off. Then they turned on again and started to blink in sequence, as if rebooting. The tiles began to move.
“Oh shit no.” said Myers. “No, no, no.”
She ran past Aaron and shoved him with surprising force. She started to run through the catacombs.
“The only way out is through here.” she said.
The tiles moved outward into the hallway, like drawers opening. This made Myers pause. She turned back. Her eyes were filled with terror. Aaron had never expected such an unsure expression from this woman. It made him more fearful than he ever felt before. she came running back in his direction.
“We can barricade ourselves in the room.” she said.
Aaron grabbed her and held her against the doorway. She was strong, but he was stronger.
“What is happening?”
“It doesn’t matter to you.” she said, spitting in his face. “You’re a natch!”
Stream rose from the crypt drawers as they opened. The stream filled the catacombs and billowed down the hallway into the lab. Then shadows began to appear in the steam. The shadows resolved to stumbling human figures.
“The children are waking up.” Aaron said.
“Hundreds…” said Myers. “Thousands of shudder children. Please, now it’s my turn to beg a favor of you. This is the most highly contagious disease known to humanity. Aaron, let me go! You run through that hall and let me barricade…”
She couldn’t finish her sentence. Her mouth began to palsy. Her arms twitched. Aaron pulled her back into the lab, but the children were already coming through the door. By the time he could get Myers propped in a chair, there were already dozens of them. They all looked confused and were looking to him as if he could tell them something. Myers twisted her body. Her bottom half went one way and the top the other. Her teeth clicked and mouth yammered some babbling nonsense as her torso threw her body back and forth, ever more violently until Aaron heard a crack that signaled a convulsion so powerful it had snapped Myer’s back. Then her head began to thrash.
Aaron tried to hold it. This time, he wasn’t strong enough. He could hold her head, but her shoulder would twist. He couldn’t hold both still at once. He had never imagined that a body could move that way. Then he noticed her skin crawling like it had on the toskyr, as if full of worms all fighting to get out. Little bits of muscle on her face rippled in ways they were never meant to do. A final thrust of Myer’s neck broke it and she lay slumped in the chair, face turned up to the ceiling and dripping blood from her mouth. The locusts weren’t done with her yet, however. They were still ripping apart her body, rippling the muscles in her skin until the skin lesioned in long scars with meat spilling out.
Aaron let go of her and turned away. He found himself standing in the middle of a group of shudder children. It seemed that they were now his responsibility.
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